There's a difference between being a communist and blindly supporting authoritarian dictatorships wearing communist masks.
I mean, tweets are pretty regularly cited on the news. Not sure how much more mainstream Twitter could become.
It would be nice if the instances could essentially federate themselves across instances. If two communities agree, they could both combine and show the posts from one another's feeds, without sacrificing their autonomy. This way if you are subscribed to once instance's community, you could see content from a much larger super community.
It's considered bad form to just toss your babies into boiling water these days. You're supposed to split their head with a knife first. Much nicer.
I think the main problem here is that there isn't a really accessible explanation of federation and how these social platforms differ from the other, larger options. There is lots of great documentation for interested users to acquaint themselves with, but it would be beneficial to have a more 'elevator pitch' version that can get people moving through the signup process with more confidence. Even just a short message saying: "hey, choosing your instance isn't as important as it looks right now, you'll be able to freely use any other instance once you sign up" could go a long way towards making on-boarding much smoother. Once a user is in the system, they can learn what details they care about through osmosis for the most part.
I do think that having a default instance would help with streamlining the on-boarding process, but I don't think that the idea aligns with the values of lemmy as a whole. It's important to keep services decentralized in order to keep things free and open.
The lemmy documentation does a great job of outlining the system and how to use it. It's well written and definitely provides all the basic information a new user would need to get their bearing withing a few pages.
And I just saw that they added vertical tabs in a recent update! Tress-style tabs is basically the only thing that was really keeping me on firefox, feature wise.
The smaller community is really a blessing, rather than a curse. I've seen this come up on reddit again and again: the best subs are the small ones that cater to niche interests. Lemmy is essentially composed entirely of those small subreddits right now.
Yes there's definitely a need for more users to really make things take off, but I believe that's a matter of time, assuming reddit doesn't take a fairly large change of course in the near future. Got to say, it feels a lot more friendly than reddit has lately.
The Reddit exodus has begun! My only regret is not learning about lemmy and the fediverse before things blew up over there.